Louise Hegarty

Louise Hegarty’s work has appeared in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. Her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media. She lives in Cork, Ireland.

Hegarty's debut novel is Fair Play.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title of my book comes from the fair play doctrine, one of the defining principles of Golden Age detective fiction - the concept that the reader should have a fair chance to solve the mystery before the grand reveal. The trick was to provide the reader with enough clues so that they could have, as TS Eliot put it “a sporting chance to solve the mystery”. It was so central to mystery writing at the time that The Detection Club – a dining club and discussion forum for writers of detective fiction founded in 1930 – began its own constitution with the line: “it is a demerit in a detective novel if the author does not play fair by the reader.” Over the years, many writers have put together their own version of the fair play rules: TS Eliot, Ronald Knox and SS Van Dine. Some writers, like JJ Connington and Ellery Queen, in radical displays of fair play, even included cluefinders at the back of their books. These were appendices that listed out all the clues with their corresponding page numbers to show the reader that they had in fact been given “a fighting chance” to solve the mystery. In my book, I use these fair play rules together with the familiar structure of a Golden Age detective novel - with its murder, its suspect, its Watson and the reveal - to explore the emotions around death and grief.

What's in a name?

I had a lot of fun choosing the names of the detective novel characters in Fair Play. I wanted the names to be like Easter Eggs that whodunnit fans could uncover. The detective’s name is Auguste Bell: Auguste from C Auguste Dupin (from arguably the world’s first detective story "The Murders on the Rue Morgue") and Bell from Joseph Bell who was one of the influences for the character Sherlock Holmes. His sidekick is named Sacker which was the original name Arthur Conan Doyle had for John Watson. Because my book has two timelines, there are also a lot of shared names (with very slight changes).

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Surprised – but also not surprised! I have been reading murder mysteries all my life which have obviously hugely influenced Fair Play.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find endings a lot easier to write. I’m not sure why exactly but I know that when I start writing something new, I want to know (even roughly) where I am supposed to be aiming. With Fair Play, the idea for the ending came to me suddenly and I wrote it very quickly. It has changed very little since the initial draft. Deciding where you are going to enter the narrative can be difficult and so it did take me a while to figure out how I was going to begin the novel.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I can’t say that any of the characters are similar to me but a lot of them are Irish people around my own age so they are a group of people that I would be familiar with.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In terms of playing with genre tropes, I took inspiration from the television show The Singing Detective and the film The Last of Sheila. When writing the grief side of things, I looked to Season 5, Episode 16 (“The Body”) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the way that genre fiction can deal with sudden deaths. I also thought a lot about the Japanese architect Toyo Ito and the White U house he built for his widowed sister and his young daughters to provide them with a place to be together and grieve, and which acted like a giant concrete hug for the family. In 1997, once the family had all moved out, Ito had the house demolished on the basis that it had done its job. In grief, we can find ourselves retreating from the wider world. Some of this is a necessity – duvet days to relax and rest – but grieving also means moving towards a routine and some hope of normalcy.

Learn more about Fair Play at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Fair Play.

--Marshal Zeringue